


If The Sky Comes Falling Down

by anistarrose



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Birthdays, Gen, Stangst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-05-12 09:50:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19226707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anistarrose/pseuds/anistarrose
Summary: Stan’s (and Ford’s) birthdays throughout the years.





	If The Sky Comes Falling Down

**Author's Note:**

> Happy June 15th! 
> 
> (Title is from Hey Brother by Avicii!)

Stan and Ford are ten years old, and every one of their birthdays has been shared. 

Every year, from the second the final school bell rings and onwards, the twins’ number one priority is planning the best birthday ever — what type of cake they want, which comic issues each of them should beg their parents for in order to maximize their combined yield, how they want to spend the day in order to make it the best day of the whole year.

Other kids at school seem to feel sorry for them, like having to share your birthday ruins all the fun of it, but to Stan and Ford, sharing has always been the whole point. With a twin, you’ve always got someone just as dedicated as you are to making your birthday _perfect_.

They’d never want it any other way.

  


Stan and Ford are seventeen years old, ready for their final year of high school, and as always they spend their birthday together. Today, they’re using the morning to work on the boat.

Freedom is tantalizingly close — just one more year of school, one more year of putting up with Dad. It feels just barely out of reach, just barely over the horizon.

If they time this thing right, and put in enough work, they might be able to complete the repairs just in time to sail out of town on the very day they turn eighteen. It’ll be a poetic and dramatic exit, as they journey onwards to clearer waters and grander adventures.

Just the two of them, going wherever they want to go. Stan can’t wait.

  


Stan (and Ford) are eighteen years old, and they aren’t spending their birthday together this year. 

Ford is probably with his family — or maybe he’s already headed out to college and made new friends ~~replacements~~ there, for all Stan knows… 

No, don’t waste time thinking about that, it won’t end well. The _only_ thing Stan knows is that for the first time in his life, he’s spending his birthday alone, and he doesn’t have any idea what to _do_. Birthdays without Ford are a foreign concept to him, like an entirely new holiday that he’s never celebrated before, and he just feels _empty_.

Eventually, he settles on going to the nearest comic store and blowing his dwindling supplies of cash on the installments he’s missed over the past few months. He ends up not even having enough money to both get fully caught up and eat tomorrow, so he only buys a few issues — but it’s still enough to put a smile on his face that evening, even if that smile is only brought about by indulging in denial, by pretending he’s back home and everything with Ford is just as it’s always been.

  


Stan (and Ford) are twenty, twenty-five, thirty years old, and Stan still treats himself for his birthday however he can most years — if not the fifteenth, then the eighteenth, or even the twenty-eighth if it takes him that long to get ahold of a few spare dollars. And many years, he enjoys himself, but on others it just isn’t worth the painful memories that always tend to surface.

He’s realizing that sharing your date of birth with someone isn’t so fun after all, if you’re not sharing the celebration too.

  


Stan is thirty-one years old, and he doesn’t know if Ford is too because he doesn’t know if Ford’s even alive.

Summer is peak tourist season, so he has plenty of cash to spare, but he doesn’t do anything to celebrate when his birthday rolls around. He briefly has the notion that he should buy a cake and bring it downstairs to the portal room, but he discards the idea just as quickly. It just hurts to much to acknowledge.

  


Stan is fifty-two years old, and has been for nearly a month now as he gives Soos a reassuring pat on the back. The kid’s tears slow down a little, but not enough.

“Hey now, what’s the matter? Do you need to go home, ‘cause… well, it pains me to say this, but you haven’t missed a day of work since I’ve hired you, and I guess I could give you _one_ day off with full pay…”

Soos shakes his head. “Nuh-uh. I — I don’t wanna be at home today.”

“Uh…” That surprises Stan, because as far as he knows Soos has a pretty idyllic home life with a grandmother who does nothing but dote on him — but if Stan has to curse out an old lady for reducing Soos to a bawling wreck, then he’ll _do_ it, damn it. He’s cursed out stranger characters before.

There’s a sharp rap on the door — specifically the door to the private side of the Mystery Shack, not the side that’s open to tourists.

“Shoot, I gotta get this. Be right back,” Stan tells Soos, tossing him a box of tissues on the way out. Soos makes no effort to catch them, and the box bounces off his shoulder with a _thwack_ as Stan cringes internally and hurries to the back porch.

And speak of the devil, it’s Soos’s Abuelita who’s waiting for him there, anxiously fidgeting with the straps of her apron.

“Has Soos come into work today?” she asks. “He said he would take the day off for his birthday party this afternoon, but he is not at home!”

_Oh_. So it’s a birthday thing.

“Yeah, I think I saw him swing by today,” Stan answers slowly. “I’ll go find him for you.”

“Thank you! I was so worried…”

Stan heads back inside, and sits down on the ground next to Soos even though his back protests against him with a burst of pain.

“Hey, kid. Your Abuelita’s looking for you.”

Soos buries his head in his hands, and mumbles something incomprehensible.

“Not a fan of birthday parties, huh? It’s okay… I’m not either.”

Soos looks up. “Really?”

Stan looks away. “Yeah, they’re just… not my thing.” 

“My dad always promises he’d come visit on my birthday,” Soos mumbles. “But then he never does…”

“Oh, kid. I’m so sorry about that.” Stan pauses, and then throws an arm over Soos’s shoulder. 

“I get it,” he whispers. “When it’s supposed to be the greatest day of the year for you, but then the people you care about — or the people you _want_ to care about you — aren’t there, year after year, then it… it really wears you down.”

“Does your family never visit you on your birthday, Mr. Pines?”

“Uh… yeah. Yeah, something like that.”

Soos wraps his arms around Stan’s chest, trapping him in a surprisingly tight hug.

“I thought I was the only one who hated my birthday,” he whispers. “I’m sorry your family’s like that, Mr. Pines, but… I’m glad I’m not the only one.”

  


Stan is sixty-one years old, and he’s perfected the art of doing nice things for himself in early June and then lying to himself about it.

The party’s just a moneymaking scheme, nothing more. Getting to dance all night and eat marshmallows and other junk food? Those are just bonuses, and the timing? Falling exactly on the fifteenth of June? Well, that’s _definitely_ just a coincidence.

Mabel is a whirlwind of energy and excitement on the dance floor, having apparently made some new friends, and Dipper is who-knows-where, probably off shirking his responsibilities and making trouble. They’re both good kids — their weirdness and stubbornness and just general _twin-ness_ is a comforting kind of familiar on some days, and a worrying kind of familiar on others, but that’s not their fault. They don’t know.

Something about the presence of the younger twins tells Stan that it’s this summer that everything will finally change, though. That this is the last birthday that he’ll spend alone, unable to share.

  


Stan and Ford are both sixty-one, and all of those years have only led up to this. To the sky being ripped apart, and a demon burning the town to the ground. 

“We used to be like Dipper and Mabel,” Ford says. “The world's about to end and they still work together. How do they _do_ it?”

“Easy, they’re _kids_ ,” Stan tells him. “They don’t know any better.” 

Ford stands up, a determined but wistful look in his eyes.

“Whoa, where you going?”

“I'm going to play the only card we have left — let Bill into my mind,” Ford explains. “He'll be able to take over the galaxy, and maybe even worse… but at least he _might_ let the kids free.”

“What? Are you kidding me?! Are you honestly telling me there's _nothing_ else we can do?!”

“Bill's only weak in the mindspace. If I didn't have this darn _plate_ in my head —” Ford makes a fist and hits the side of his skull for emphasis, producing a metallic clang. “— we could just erase him with the memory gun when he steps inside my mind.”

“What if he goes into my mind? My brain isn’t good for anything.”

Ford chuckles sadly. “There's nothing in your mind he wants. It has to be me. We need to take his deal, it's the only way he'll agree to save you and the kids.”

“Do you really think he’s gonna make good on that deal?”

Ford sighs. “What other choice do we have?”

“You could… holy shit, Ford, quick! Put on my clothes!”

“ _Excuse me_?!”

Stan takes off his fez and slaps it on Ford’s head. “If we switch places, Bill can go in my mind and then you can erase him! If it fooled all our teachers, why can’t it fool a demon?”

Ford throws the fez to the ground and grabs him by the shoulders, and Stan braces himself for a reply of _you idiot, that’ll never work, don’t you think I would have thought of that myself if it would?_ — but he’s left completely unprepared for the words that actually come out of Ford’s mouth, quiet and slow and _afraid_ in a way Stan hasn’t heard in decades:

“Stanley, that won’t just erase Bill. It’ll erase _you_.”

“But will it work?” Stan doesn’t even need to ask — Ford has a certain gleam in his eyes, a certain look of awe upon his face that only appears when he’s truly blown away by a revelation that never occurred to him, but makes all the sense in the world. It’s a look that’s partially obscured behind an expression of fear, of guilt, of desperation — but it’s definitely there.

“It will work,” Ford whispers, “but I don’t want to lose you.”

“It’s either erasing one idiot’s memories or letting a lot of people die, Ford! We’re — we’re running out of time, damn it!”

Ford stares at the ground as he begins to pull off his trenchcoat. “I’m so sorry, Stan.”

“I am too, Ford.”

  


A man wakes up in a clearing and remembers nothing, least of all his age.

Strangers approach him, cry over him, call him a hero and hug him uncomfortably tight, and he doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know what to say.

Ford, the older man, tells him that his name is Stanley, and that the two of them are brothers, that they’re twins, but something about the realization rings hollow. Any connection Stan might’ve once had with this man has since been severed, leaving them to share a face, a birthday, and nothing more.

…Or at least, that’s what one would think, because surely a disoriented and confused shell of a man with ill-fitting clothes and no memories can’t be a brother to anyone, not in any of the ways that truly matter — but when Stan looks at Ford and sees him staring off into the distance with a defeated frown on his face, looks at any of these strangers and sees them in anguish… his heart feels like it’s about to be torn in two. So maybe, just maybe, _some_ fragment of a connection has persisted.

He tries to lighten the mood, to no avail, and tries to remember the scenes in the scrapbook the girl shows him — and when words start spilling out of his mouth on instinct, he’s relieved not for himself, but for the others. (For his family.)

He’s relieved when he sees them start to smile, to _hope_ , and finally thinks _Yeah, these faces look familiar._

  


Stan and Ford are sixty-two years old, and they blow out the candles on their birthday cake together as Dipper takes pictures and Mabel showers both of them in confetti.

“Mabel, sweetie, that’s kind of a fire hazard,” Stan warns her. “You know, with the candles and all —”

“Oh, it’s _fine_ ,” Ford cuts in. “We all know where the fire extinguisher is, don’t we?”

“Yeah, because _you’ve_ already come seconds away from blowing us into the stratosphere twice this summer!”

They laugh, and then Stan and Ford argue over who gets to cut the cake, but there’s no malice behind the words. It’s just the usual sibling banter — one of the many little things that Stan and Ford have found themselves appreciating more than ever this past year, after having gone so long without it.

Everyone is stuffed except for Stan, who’s cleaning out the last few spoonfuls from a tub of ice cream, when Ford pours one last glass of milk and raises it towards Stan like one would for a toast.

“Here’s to more birthdays together,” he says, and Stan hastily picks up his own cups to clink it against Ford’s. It’s not a very satisfying clink, since both cups are plastic, but it’s good enough. It’s the sentiment that really makes the toast, after all.

“To more birthdays together,” Stan echoes.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, comments are appreciated as always! I realize Stan acted in Blendin’s Game like he didn’t know what caused Soos to hate his birthday, but I feel like it’s plausible he wouldn’t have wanted to share something so personal with the others if Soos clearly didn’t want to talk about it (and also I wrote that scene before realizing this potential continuity issue and just really wanted to keep that dialogue).
> 
> Anyways, I could go on and on about how much these two stubborn old men mean to me, but to keep it brief, thinking and writing about them has helped me through a bunch of rough patches, so I felt like it was about time to write something for their birthday (which I’d hoped to do last year, but writer’s block was a bitch). I’m so proud of this whole dumb fictional family, and I had the biggest smile imaginable on my face while I was writing that scene of pure fluff at the end :’)


End file.
